More Coverage

A London pathologist may have been sympathetic to violent jihadists, but that doesn’t make him a terrorist conspirator, a judge said Friday.

Crown prosecutor Jason Wakely argued that Dr. Khurram Syed Sher knew full well his good buddy had terrorist leanings when he met him and another man in a bugged Ottawa apartment on July 20, 2010.

“So what,” Justice Charles Hackland said, interrupting Wakely’s closing submissions: So what if Sher had been intrigued by the other men’s radical philosophy?

If there had merely been an “unconcluded” discussion, “that would not support the charge (of conspiracy to facilitate terrorist activity),” Hackland said.

Wakely had spent most of the trial making a big deal about the July 2010 meeting and an oath to “Q and T” — Al-Qaeda and the Taliban — that the trio discussed and that Wakely said cemented the conspiracy.

But after Hackland’s intervention, Wakely said Sher had actually joined the alleged conspiracy in May 2010, when Sher gave his friend $400.

Sher had testified he thought it was going to the “poor and needy” in Iraq, saying he only learned in the July 2010 meeting that it likely went to fund the mujahedeen overseas instead.

“Sher knew on May 10 this money was going to the mujahedeen,” Wakely said. “His role in the conspiracy became more significant in July.”

But Hackland appeared skeptical.

The two alleged co-conspirators had held a sort of camp between July 9 and 11, 2010, on La Peche Lake in Gatineau — after Wakely said the conspiracy had been hatched — but RCMP bugs appear to show Sher wasn’t considered for an invitation.

His name only came up once, while the men practised archery. Sher’s friend simply mentioned that he knew Sher to be a good archer.

The other alleged co-conspirator didn’t even know who Sher was.

“That seems to be the point that resonated with me to some extent,” Hackland said.

Wakely, however, disputed that the camping trip — in which police observed participants shooting at trees with air rifles — had anything to do with terrorism.

“This was not a training camp for members of the terrorist conspiracy,” he said, in a somewhat surprising admission.

“The camp does not illustrate they were members of a terrorist group.”

Arguments in the lengthy and hard-fought trial are expected to conclude Monday morning.